Thursday, May 22, 2014

World War T: The Prequel

We aren’t getting any sleep, here, and before you say “welcome
to the club,” know that our triplets have always been pretty good
sleepers. Anyway, we aren’t getting any
sleep, and you can probably relate. We
are now part of the Slow Zombie Parents.

A little introduction:
When I say slow, I don’t mean it derogatorily. Instead, “slow zombies” refers to the types
of zombies typically featured in older movies.
Those are the zombies we in the parenting set are most familiar with,
I’d imagine - Zombies slowed by the fact that they are held together by rotting
flesh and essentially brainless. Not the
newer, “fast zombies” that move at Usain Bolt speeds and cut on a dime like
Adrian Peterson. Those zombies move spectacularly
for even a healthy human construction, let alone one made of only the flimsiest
of remaining connective tissue.

You know what can make you a zombie (in real, real life)? The poison from a fugu fish - i.e. Japanese Blowfish. Really.

You know what else? Having 2.5 year-old triplets who aren't sleeping. Think about it. We groan as we roll out of bed, our eyes swollen with the 4
hours of sleep they still need. Becaues
our eyes are blurred by that lack of sleep, we stumble and slide-step our way
to the nursery.

We reach mindlessly into cribs to pull out our victims, er,
children. After putting them we
immediately realize what we have done and begin to chase after them. However, children are the one age at which
humans can actually move like fast zombies, regardless of little sleep they have
had. In fact, sleep appears to be
inversely related to how fast they can move.
So now they are zooming around getting into,

hey, get out of that, get
away from there, no, don’t do that

and we are right behind them, hands outstretched. Know what we look like in this pre-caffeine,
no-sleep state? We look like the picture at right? What I have just described looks exactly like the dance from Michael Jackson's Thriller.

That example doesn't require anything like toxoplasmosa gondii to turn an average parent into a zombie.

Have you heard of mad-cow disease? When a human eats infected cow and contracts the disease they call itCreutzfeldt-Jakob. Anyway, what are the symptoms? Glad you asked:

1 - Changes in gait (walking)

2 - Hallucinations

3 - Lack of coordination (for example, stumbling and falling)

4 - Muscle twitching

5 - Myoclonic jerks or seizures

6- Rapidly developing delirium or dementia

Um, OK. If that defines zombie, well, good luck. A tired parent is, um, well, lets go down that list, shall we? Number 1: Changes in gait? Check, as I noted above. Number 2: hallucinations? Completely reasonable in someone missing sleep. Number 3: lack of coordination? Lack of coordination? As I noted in a recent post, I lack coordination on good days.

Well, we are already 3 for 3, so, lets quit before we come to any existential crisis, OK?